· As Sir Thomas Browne once observed, "a scholastick and academical life is very uniform; and has, indeed, more safety than pleasure", so it is rare that a young academic discovers something to set her heart pounding.

Having gained access to the Rebecca West archive at Tulsa University, Oklahoma, PhD student Kathryn Laing came across four exercise books labelled "The Sentinel by Isabel Lancashire". The handwriting seemed familiar, and indeed, as it turned out, she had stumbled upon West's first novel, written under a pseudonym. Proof that high drama can be generated by a cataloguing error.

The Sentinel will be published by the European Humanities Research Centre at Oxford University later this year to coincide with the centenary of the suffragette movement, of which the novel is an account. In it the high-minded heroine, Adela, is handcuffed and force-fed with a tube until she vomits. We are also promised a degree of homoeroticism between Adela and a suffragette called Psyche.

As well as being a fascinating document of the women's movement in Britain, it sounds like perfect material for yet another Andrew Davies adaptation. Rebecca West (real name Cecily Isabel Fairfield) began a turbulent 10-year love affair with HG Wells in 1913, during which she bore him a son. However, in a 1912 review of his novel Marriage in the Freewoman, she complained of his "sex-obsession", which, she said, "lay clotted on [his novels] like cold white sauce". Yuck.

· This week the Czech republic began the process of electing a successor to Vaclav Havel as president. To mark the end of the playwright's term of office, the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond is staging the UK premiere of Havel's play The Beggar's Opera, translated by Paul Wilson and directed by Geoffrey Beevers. On Wednesday, Sir Tom Stoppard will introduce the play at an evening in aid of Writers in Prison by British Pen.

The Beggar's Opera was first performed before a private audience of 300 in a Prague suburb in November 1975, much to the annoyance of the secret police. According to Milos Forman, "Anyone who wants to know why it is so easy for powerful people to abuse their fellow men should see this play." On his retirement, Havel is to revive his interrupted career as a playwright.

· This month, Penguin relaunches its classics list for the first time in 18 years, hoping to rejacket 70 titles in three months. The redesign remains sombre in mood, but we are assured that the contents have been rejigged, with expanded introductions and updated reading lists.

It is a noble exercise, one might imagine, although cynics could suggest it also provides an excuse to hike up prices. Allen Lane, who published the first Penguin paperbacks in 1935, is generally regarded as a force for good, his mission being to "democratise learning" and bring great literature to the great unwashed. But he was also a shrewd businessman who aimed to convert "book-borrowers into book-buyers" and to encourage "the popularisation of the bookshop and the increased sale of books".

In 1936 George Orwell warned that Penguin paperbacks would result in "a flood of cheap reprints which will cripple the lending libraries". Now that our last remaining libraries are full of CDs and videos, he may have had a point. IP